Kishkumen wrote:
Everything I heard about Clinton's ground game was not encouraging to say the least.
Clinton's ground-game, whatever you make of it on its own terms, was vastly superior to Trump's.
This should be viewed as vindication of the "ground game matters very little for presidential elections" proponents.It likely was not a significant factor in her loss.
I don't believe that the election was necessarily something that had to be decided on a razor thin margin. It was at least partly because of the candidates involved. Clinton was the wrong candidate for the time. I stand by that position. She could have, and probably should have won. If you can beat a highly intelligent and experienced candidate with an unprincipled, undisciplined, and inexperienced moron with no morals for reasons that have little to do with the choice and quality of the candidates, then we are well and truly screwed.
In this post you've made a subtle change in argument. I am in this thread contending that factors cited by Kevin such as voter suppression in key swing states, Russian interference, etc. probably had a decisive impact on the outcome. You have flipped into arguing that Clinton was generally bad, so the election shouldn't have been close enough to have small factors be decisive. None of these, you contend, were the primary cause of her defeat.
That's true. But the primary cause of her defeat was general election conditions. The aggregate of fundamentals models favored the generic Republican by a couple of points. Those models tend to be very accurate. If you are looking at the main reason she lost, that's it. The country was Democrat weary and conditions weren't good enough to overcome that. The fact that Clinton actually beat those projections a little bit suggests, but does not demonstrate, something about either the strength of her or the weakness of Trump. It's almost certainly the weakness of Trump, but it does seem interesting to me that the election ended up right near the sweet spot of what models have been successfully predicting for a while.
If you are looking at candidate specific factors, it is obvious the answer is the fact that Clinton was covered like she was in the middle of Watergate for something that did not even begin to approximate deserving that type or level of coverage. The question then becomes how much of that is because of Clinton and how much of that was because of factors outside of Clinton's control. It's a little from both columns, but I think you are really missing the picture if you don't understand how and why the right-wing media ecosystem can drive mainstream coverage this way. Because
that part is not Clinton-specific.
Yeah, I voted for Kerry, the first time I actually voted Democrat, and largely because I thought the Iraq War was a complete fiasco BEFORE we started it. But the guy had zero charisma. It was easy to believe he was weak and unpatriotic. I didn't believe it, but it wasn't because he seemed like a good candidate. It was more because he had the right position on the issues. I had to overcome my dislike of Kerry in order to vote for him. I did not have a lot of confidence he would win. I just figured he might because of the disaster in Iraq. Boy was I wrong.
Whether you like Kerry personally or not has nothing to do with his strength as a candidate. He nearly beat an incumbent president in a decent economy when that president's approvals were in the 50's. If not for the anti-gay marriage amendment strategy, he probably did enough to win it. That's quite an accomplishment. To me, this reads as people who declare whichever team wins the game as the best team. Sometimes the better team loses.
Kerry was a legitimate war hero. George W. Bush was a silver-spoon Yale cheerleader who was able to avoid risky military service. And yet, PR was able to turn Kerry into a pussy and George W. Bush into a man's man cowboy. This says something about the power of political messaging, not the traits of the candidates. There has not been a Democratic candidate since the advent of the right-wing media that has not had sustained attacks erode their image. Not one. Any white knight you imagine is going to be the perfect candidate is going to walk out of that gauntlet tarnished in ordinary election circumstances.
If Obama had won more narrowly, then I might be inclined to agree.
Obama was running in conditions nearly as good as what FDR had against Hoover. He did not win a FDR'esque victory. Not even close. Why didn't Democrats win like they did in 1932 given the conditions they were handed on a silver platter? There's several reasons why outside of Obama himself, but your reasoning on this is iffy. I already said it, but it seems like you don't pay enough attention to conditions candidates run in, then falsely attribute success or failure to their personal qualities.
Democrats are going to do well in November. It's an open question whether they are going to do well enough to take legislatures due to gerrymandering, but they are going to win the popular vote by a good margin unless something crazy happens. This is not because Democrats all of a sudden now have better candidates. It's because it is a mid-term and the incumbent Republican president is fairly unpopular.